


only fools follow golden rules

by brunchandtedium



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (as of heart of it all), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Post-Episode: s03e14 Juno Steel and the Mega-Ultrabots of Cyberjustice, Speculation, Team as Family, hypothetical best-case scenario for how the Nureyev Debt Reveal could go down, which we probably won't get because kabert want our space pirates to Suffer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25097536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brunchandtedium/pseuds/brunchandtedium
Summary: In which Peter Nureyev has a crisis of conscience, realizes his family cares about him, and eventually does the right thing.(Post-"Mega-Ultrabots of Cyberjustice". Remember, kids: before deciding to betray your found family, always make sure to tell your mom first!)
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko & Peter Nureyev, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 140





	only fools follow golden rules

**Author's Note:**

> Every day... every day I am thinking about 38:40-39:40 of "Mega-Ultrabots of Cyberjustice". Praying that our boy Sneaky Pete will end up doing right by his found family - but in case he doesn't, have this fix-fic.
> 
> Title from "The Riddle" from the musical The Scarlet Pimpernel.

They’re halfway through _Dolphin Stockbrokers 3: Misadventures in Porpoise Capitalism_ when Buddy first notices it.

It’s been weeks since she and her crew managed to fix up the Carte Blanche and lift off of that damned ocean planet, but it’ll be a good few weeks more before they can take a shot at the Curemother Prime. Until their window of opportunity opens up early next month, there’s very little to do but quadruple-check their preparations and twiddle their thumbs in the Kuiper Belt.

So, as has proven increasingly common in the past few weeks of what she’s been calling “family bonding time” and what Juno’s been calling “cruel and unusual punishment, Jesus, Buddy, how can you coop up six people in a tin can for this long and not expect us to snap,” they’re all camped out in the common room watching a stream marathon. Rita’s choice, of course. She’s been trying to get Ransom to watch the first stream in this series with her for ages, and when he finally agreed a few days ago, she decided the rest of them needed to experience the whole trilogy. 

Rita herself has set up shop on the floor in a blanket nest that’s covering up everything but the top of her bun, leaning against the armchair Jet’s managed to cram himself into.

The L-shaped couch opposite Jet is a cramped fit for the rest of them, but by now they’ve learned how to make do. Juno’s out cold, draped like an ungainly housecat over Ransom, who’s got one hand in Juno’s hair and the other preventing their communal popcorn tub from falling off the couch and onto Rita’s head. A few feet away, Buddy and Vespa have claimed the other section, Vespa propped against Buddy’s chest and sandwiched between her legs.

The stream they’re watching… well. The _Dolphin Stockbrokers_ trilogy isn’t what anyone would call a cinema classic, and Buddy stopped understanding what was going on around the half-hour mark of the second installment. So Buddy’s been more preoccupied with stealing fleeting downward glances at her girlfriend whenever Vespa isn’t looking.

Her almost-wife. God, that’s never going to get old, is it? 

It’s a good thing her duties as captain aren’t nearly as demanding nowadays, because Buddy finds herself spending more hours of the day than not daydreaming about the wedding. How stunning Vespa’s going to look in her tux. How stunning Vespa looks all the time, even when she’s not trying to.

Even when, as is currently happening, Vespa’s brandishing the TV remote like a baton and threatening to slap Ransom upside the head with it.

“It’s a _movie_ , goddamnit, not a documentary. If you say the words ‘artistic license’ one more time, I’m not gonna be held responsible for what I do with this thing,” Vespa growls. 

Ransom holds the hand that isn’t carding through Juno’s hair up in a placating gesture, causing the popcorn tub on the couch to teeter uncomfortably. “I’m not saying it’s a documentary, all I’m saying is the directors really should have spent a bit more time on their research!” 

A few hours ago, Juno began amusing himself by loudly pointing out all the inaccuracies in the plot - Vespa started an argument with him over it, because of course she did, and Ransom jumped to Juno’s defense like a knight in shining armor, because _of course he did._ It’s been a while since Juno started snoring, but the other two still haven’t let the argument die, for lack of anything more interesting to do.

“They’re attempting to portray the Neptunian finance industry, but to be frank, I don’t think whoever directed this stream has ever set foot on Neptune,” Ransom goes on, gesticulating wildly. 

He’s usually not this animated — Buddy suspects he only gets like this on the rare occasion when he forgets he’s supposed to be putting up a mask around them. It’s been happening more and more, as of late, and Buddy finds it rather endearing. “This isn’t at all how they do things there. They’ve been making all their deals in-person, which is good for drama, but on the real Neptune that’s a major sign of disrespect. When Neptunian stocks are bought and sold, it’s always over comms, perhaps over email, but they’d never do it face-to-face like this.”

“Look, I don’t know who died and made you the expert on Neptune—”

“I impersonated the CFO of Neptune’s largest silicate corporation. For a year and a half.”

“But— Jesus, you know what? We’ve gotten to the point where you claim you’ve done ridiculous shit like that and I just accept it implicitly. Why I trust you like that, I have no clue. But, anyways,” Vespa jabs the remote at Ransom for emphasis, “the point is, I don’t care what happens in real life on Neptune, because the main characters of this stream are _anthropomorphic goddamn dolphins_. They can do whatever the hell they want. They’ve got flippers for hands, I don’t think they could pick up a comms unit if they wanted to.”

Vespa’s face is deadly serious, brow furrowed, the same expression she gets on a mission right before she assassinates her target, and Buddy’s about to burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all - until she looks over at Ransom. His head is tilted to one side, and his face is blank, as if he’s forgotten their debate entirely.

He pauses. When he speaks again, it’s hesitant, more measured. “You... trust me?”

Vespa looks taken aback. “Uh. I mean, no, I’m not about to go spilling my darkest secrets to you or anything. But, well.” She clears her throat. “Every time I’ve thought you were gonna backstab us, I was wrong. Every time you say you’ve done something wild like taking over an entire corporation from the inside, you’ve been able to back it up. And you do good work, most of the time. So, no, I don’t trust you — I don’t trust anyone but Buddy, though, don’t go thinking you’re special. But I _am_ pretty sure you’re not gonna try and screw us over.”

Vespa seems like she’s reached her emotional intimacy threshold for the entire week. Buddy is reminded, not for the first time in the past ten minutes, how much she loves Vespa. 

But then she notices the expression on Ransom’s face.

In the dim light of the TV screen, he looks— fragile. Raw, almost. Like all of the masks he puts up have suddenly fallen away, and he’s experiencing a hundred unnameable emotions at once for the whole world to see. It’s the same look Juno gets when someone asks about his brother, that Jet gets when he’s offered alcohol or opiates, that Buddy knows she gets whenever the ship comes within half a parsec of Balder.

She’s never seen Ransom wear that kind of expression before — in fact, Buddy can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen him look anything other than perfectly put-together. Absently, she wonders if something Vespa said set him off. If, perhaps, that’s just what he looks like all the time when he’s not pretending to be a man named Peter Ransom. 

Buddy’s just about to ask if he’s alright when one of the dolphins sets off a bomb onscreen. Rita jumps nearly a foot in the air at the sudden loud noise and jostles the popcorn tub, which, now that Ransom’s no longer guarding it, tips over and unceremoniously dumps cheese-dusted popcorn kernels all over Rita’s blanket nest. 

By the time the commotion is over and Rita’s stopped screaming, the expression is gone.

The conversation turns to what flavor of popcorn they should make next, and Ransom’s back to his usual easy smile, and Buddy almost doesn’t notice that he’s a lot quieter, a lot less animated than before. Or that, when the stream finally ends, he’s the first one to leave. 

———

Ransom barely leaving his quarters for the next three days, on the other hand? That’s a lot harder to ignore.

The only time Buddy sees hide or hair of him is family mealtimes. Even then, he keeps his head down, wolfing down his food as fast as possible before slinking off. Buddy knows he’s keeping up with his part of the chore rotation, because the dishes still get done and the clothes still get laundered on the days when it’s Ransom’s job to deal with it. But that’s just about the only proof she has that he’s still alive.

She asks Juno about it, late one night while they’re looking over the Curemother facility’s exit routes for what must be the thousandth time. With how closely he’s joined at the hip with Ransom these days, she expects him to know what’s wrong. But all he can tell her is that Ransom’s been acting just as strange around him as he has been around everyone else, and that he has no idea why.

“I mean, Ransom’s a grown man, he’s his own person. He’s allowed to have secrets. I don’t need to know what’s going on in his head all the time,” Juno says, in a tone that implies he’d very much like to know what’s going on in Ransom’s head all the time.

But Juno’s right. Buddy’s his captain, not his mother. As long as Ransom’s personal issues aren’t affecting his work (which they’re not, now that there’s no work to be done for the foreseeable future), if he wants to tell her what’s got him so upset, he can come to her on his own time.

And he does, eventually.

The Carte Blanche finally docks somewhere, for the first time in weeks. Their destination’s only a small asteroid where they can buy some cheap fuel, but to a crew that’s been stuck in deep space for almost a month, it’s heaven. 

It’s early evening, and most of the crew is groundside. Jet’s haggling for fuel, Vespa’s restocking their medkit, Juno and Rita are holed up in a convenience store searching for some Martian-exclusive brand of cloned beef jerky.

Buddy’s still on the ship, though; her joints have been acting up again, and this seemed as good a time as any to get some bookkeeping done. She didn’t see Ransom leave with the others, either, so she assumes he’s somewhere on the ship as well. Not that he’s fulfilling company — she hasn’t seen him since breakfast yesterday.

By the time she’s done with her paperwork, there’s still a few hours left before the rest of the crew’s expected back on the Carte Blanche. So Buddy cleans off her office desk, walks down the hall to her quarters, and brews herself a pot of tea. (Food may be off the cards for her these days, but that doesn't mean she can’t enjoy a good non-alcoholic beverage from time to time.)

She’s just taken out the teabags when there’s a knock at the door. Quiet, tentative, like whoever’s knocking doesn’t know whether or not they actually want to come in.

Vespa would just let herself in. The others don’t knock like that unless they’re about to give Buddy some bad news and they’re scared of pissing her off. So either something’s gone terribly wrong in the three hours the crew have been groundside, or it’s Ransom.

Buddy undoes her ponytail, tucks her hair firmly over her cybernetic eye. Then she steels herself to receive some unpleasant news, puts on her best ‘mean captain’ face, and opens the door. 

Her first conscious feeling is relief, because it’s just Ransom. She’d been half-expecting her mystery guest to be Rita telling her Juno started a shootout with some Mercurian mobsters at the convenience store, or something along those lines. Buddy’s gaze softens, because if there’s one thing she knows about Ransom, whatever comes out of his mouth probably isn’t going to annoy her.

Then she realizes that Ransom looks like _hell._

If she thought he’d looked out of sorts a few nights ago in the common room, that’s nothing compared to now. His hair’s all over the place, and there’s deep bags barely covered with concealer under his eyes, which don’t seem to be focused entirely on her. She can’t remember the last time she saw him even remotely underdressed, but he’s here in nothing but sweatpants and a rumpled sleep shirt. His crutch is under one arm, keeping weight off of his bad leg, and under his other arm is a tablet computer and a folder overflowing with papers.

He stands there for a moment, staring back at her with wide eyes. Then he speaks. “Apologies for the intrusion, Captain. I just— I needed to talk to you, if that’s alright.”

“Of course, darling. What’s the matter?” Buddy asks, leaning against the doorframe.

“I’ve, well.” Ransom swallows audibly, is silent for a few moments as he shifts his weight from his good leg to the crutch under his other arm. “For lack of a better term, I’ve fucked up. Rather badly, I might admit. And I thought I’d explain the full situation to you before I start trying to extricate myself from the mess I’m in.”

Well, there isn’t much Buddy can say to that. Not when the definition of “fucked up” could be “Juno and I had a disagreement and he kicked me out of his bedroom,” or “I shot the Prime Minister of Venus and the Second Galactic War is imminent”, or anything and everything in between. So all she says is, “Okay. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Ransom blinks. “What?” 

“It’s been my experience that all bad conversations are improved, at least slightly, by a cup of tea. And it just so happens that I brewed a pot for myself right before you knocked on my door. A nice Earl Grey, from when we stopped on Hela. Would you like some?”

And so, a couple of minutes later, they’re situated — Buddy sitting cross-legged on her bed, Ransom facing her in Vespa’s desk chair, both of them holding steaming mugs of tea. Ransom asked for his black, unsweetened. Every time she’s seen him drinking coffee or tea around the ship, it’s been with two sugars and enough milk to drown a cat. She wonders if it means something.

She’s quiet for a while, gives Ransom space to start talking on his own time. When it becomes apparent he’s not going to do anything but stare at her blankly, Buddy drums her fingers against her bedspread and says, “Alright, Pete. So you’re having trouble, and you need my help, or at least my advice. That’s alright — we can deal with that. But I need you to tell me what’s wrong, so I can figure out how to help.”

Ransom laughs at that, the first real expression Buddy’s seen on his face since she opened her door. But it’s harsh, and dry, and not at all a comforting sound. 

“I’m not… I’m not asking for help. Not because I don’t need it, but because I don’t think you can give it, or that you’ll even want to give it, once I explain the nature of the issue.” He hunches forward, clenches his fingers tightly around his mug until they begin to turn white and bloodless. “I’m here as… more of a forewarning, really. To make sure that you and the rest of the crew aren’t dragged down along with me and my idiotic mistake.”

“I’ll be the judge of whether or not I’m able to help, darling,” Buddy says. “But I need to know what kind of mistake you’re talking about.” 

Ransom takes in a sharp breath. “It has to do with my status as a member of this crew. I must confess that I… I was not entirely truthful in telling you my reasons for taking this job, that first night after we stole the Gilded Globe.” 

And, well. There’s a lingering suspicion Buddy’s had about Ransom since before she accepted him onto the ship. She’s almost convinced herself these past few months that she was mistaken, but it’s looking more and more like her suspicion was justified, and Buddy desperately doesn’t want to be right, but she has to _know_. 

“You were planning on stealing the Curemother from us in order to pay off your debts.” It’s a statement, not a question. 

Ransom almost drops his mug. “What? No,” he says. 

That’s a relief, at least. But Ransom doesn’t look like he’s finished, so Buddy stays silent and waits for him to continue. 

He breathes in slowly through his nose, then exhales even slower. He’s intensely studying a grease stain on the floor, unwilling to meet her eyes, when he finally speaks again. “I… after we successfully stole the Curemother, I was planning on stealing the Map, Key, Blade, and Book from you in order to pay off my debts.”

Ah. There it is. 

Buddy feels… a lot of things. She wants to scream at him. She wants to take the blaster under her mattress and knock him out, drag him down to the brig and lock him up before he does anything else stupid and mission-endangering. Some small part of her wants to give him a hug. Mostly, she wants to give him a good shake and ask him _what the hell he was thinking._

Instead of doing any of that, Buddy keeps her face carefully neutral and asks, “And I assume, by the fact you’re telling me this, that that is no longer your intention?”

Ransom’s shoulders slump — like he’s been bracing for a blow, and has just realized it’s not going to come. “No. No, it’s not,” he says quickly. “This family deserves better than that. Than me, I suppose.” 

He takes a long sip from his mug. If his tea is anything like Buddy’s, it’s still much too hot to drink, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Which is why I came here to tell you that — so you can take whatever precautions you deem necessary to ensure the safety of your upcoming heist. Decide whether you still trust me to help steal the Curemother Prime, now that you know my original intentions were to steal from you as well. Or whether you’d rather lock me up, or drop me off at the next port.”

“Why?” Buddy asks.

“You’ve been doing this for far longer than I have, Captain. Surely I don’t have to tell you why it might be a bad idea to work with someone who formerly planned to betray you.” 

“No, I’m asking why you’re telling me this in the first place. You don’t strike me as the sharing type, Pete, not unless it’s absolutely necessary. Why would you decide to confess all of this and risk tarnishing your own reputation, when you could just keep quiet, _not_ make off with the Map, Key, Blade, and Book, and be done with it?” 

Then the realization hits her, and her stomach sinks. “Someone’s after you, aren’t they. Whoever you’re in debt to, you’ve already promised them those four artifacts in particular, and soon they’ll be expecting you to deliver.” 

Ransom nods grimly. “Yes. I was… getting to that,” he says. “But that’s my problem to deal with, not yours. My creditors are only aware of the existence of the Map, Key, Blade, and Book, not the Curemother Prime. Nor do they know the identities of the crew that had a hand in stealing them.” His face is stony, resolute, but his hands are trembling around the mug. “I’ll find another way to appease them. I’ve been going through some alternative scenarios that might allow me to pay off my debts in... roughly the same length of time.” 

From the way his voice falls, it doesn’t sound to Buddy like many of those scenarios seem as though they’re going to pan out. Her suspicion’s confirmed when Ransom pauses, then says more quietly, “Even so, if you conclude that I’m still worth keeping on the ship, it might be wise of you to sever all ties with me as soon as we retrieve the Curemother. If and when my creditors decide I’m better off dead, I cannot guarantee they won’t extend their wrath to anyone I’m currently associated with.”

A thought occurs to Buddy. “How can I be sure you’re telling the truth, though?” she asks. “I’d like to believe you haven’t completely sold us out here, Pete, but do you have any proof you haven’t done so?” 

It’s the truth — she really does want to believe Ransom, believe that he’s still a good man somewhere deep down, that her heist and the rest of her crew are safe from whoever’s after him. But if all she has to go on is his word, that’s an issue.

“I thought you might ask that.” Ransom sets his mug down on the desk behind him, trades it for the tablet computer he’d placed there when he first entered Buddy’s quarters. He turns it on with a _beep_ and opens up a terminal window, fingers flying as he keys in a long series of commands. “This is the dossier I compiled and sent to my creditors regarding the items I intended to pay off my debts with. It’s the only written correspondence I’ve had with them since this heist began.”

He holds the tablet out to Buddy like it’s a hot poker. It’s opened up to a random page covered in detailed schematics. She takes it, numbly, and begins to read.

The document on the screen is long and incredibly detailed. Still, Ransom was right: it contains no mention of the Carte Blanche, its crew, or the Curemother Prime. There’s swathes of information on the Map’s navigational capabilities, the types of machinery compatible with the Blade and the Key, the Book’s processing speed and staggering array of hacking programs — but not a word on how they could be used to find and retrieve the Curemother. There’s pages of tentative plans on how to steal each of the artifacts — but upon closer inspection, they’re all written with a single thief in mind, not a crew of six. 

Somehow, Ransom developed a set of completely fake plans for each heist in order to convince his creditors that he would be working alone. They’re good plans, too. Buddy almost has it in her to be impressed.

She supposes the dossier she’s reading could be fake, something Ransom cooked up just before coming to her room in order to convince her that the Curemother heist hasn’t been compromised. Then she looks at Ransom’s face. He doesn’t look relieved, like a man who’s about to have his innocence proven. No, he looks almost more terrified than he had when Buddy first opened her door. Like a man awaiting his execution. 

Buddy can’t figure out why — everything he’s told her is corroborated by the document. 

That is, until she scrolls all the way back to the first page and sees, in large, bold print, the name of the dossier’s author. A name that is decidedly not Peter Ransom.

Her first thought is: _Why would you go to all the trouble of creating an alias for yourself, if you’re just going to make your fake first name the same thing as your real first name?_

Then Buddy takes a good, long look at the author’s last name, realizes just where she’s heard it before, and her second thought is: _Holy shit._

Her head snaps up to meet his gaze. “ _You’re_ the Angel of Brahma?” she blurts out, before she can stop herself.

Ransom sighs. “Unfortunately. The name on that dossier… it’s my birth name, yes.”

Something about that just doesn’t add up.

Because Buddy remembers the day she first heard what happened on Brahma. That economy-class spaceflight to Linsheng, back when she and Vespa were young and didn’t yet have the funds to charter their own ship. Vespa bursting into their cramped sleeper cabin with her comms open to a newsfeed and a grin wider than Buddy had seen in weeks, telling her that while they’d been sleeping, the infamous Guardian Angel System had fallen. 

She remembers spending the rest of that flight nose-deep in research, trying to find out who the hell could’ve organized such a large-scale assault on New Kinshasa. Brahma itself had no established insurgent groups, and although the Lunides System surrounding it had several, none were stepping up to take credit for the attack. Buddy had business in the Outer Rim, and she needed to know what was going on there to keep herself and Vespa safe.

Then the Brahmese government started their endless tirade of arrest warrants for one Peter Nureyev, and from the little information Buddy could dredge up, he was just… a lone agent. Not even an experienced lone agent, at that; the blurry figure in the photographs attached to the warrants couldn’t be older than his mid-twenties.

But he wasn’t even that old, was he? Not if the man sitting in front of her, every muscle tensed like he might bolt at any second, really is who he claims to be. On his initial application to join the crew, he’d said he was thirty-seven. That was a year ago, and the whole business with Brahma was a little over two decades before that…

“You were sixteen,” Buddy muses, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Jesus. You brought an entire planet’s government to its knees, and you were sixteen.”

“At least, if I’ve estimated my own age correctly. I was a child, caught up in things I didn’t fully understand, and I made a foolish choice,” Ransom — or, rather, Nureyev — says, voice small. “It may have been the right choice, in the end, but a foolish one nonetheless. And I’ve spent the rest of my life paying for it.” 

Then he laughs again, that bitter, broken thing that makes something twist in Buddy’s chest. “Quite literally, in fact. That’s how I first became involved with my creditors. I was sixteen, had nothing to my name, and needed to disappear as quickly as I could. I believed them when they told me they had the resources to make it happen. And they did, of course — they just neglected to mention the price tag that came with it until it was too late.”

It makes sense in hindsight, that the Nameless Thief accrued all of his debts back when he still had a name to be held over his head as leverage. She imagines what he must have been like back then, right after the fall of the Guardian Angel System: blood on his hands, fire in his eyes, with nothing and nobody he could rely on. Willing to do anything to make it from one day to the next, no matter the consequences.

Buddy was like that too, at one time in her life. The first few years after her release from Balder Penitentiary, when she was still idealistic, convinced that her Vespa was alive somewhere and she was the only person in the galaxy capable of getting her back. She did a lot of things she’s not entirely proud of, back then.

What changed that, for her? What made her realize some risks came at too great a cost to be worth taking? Well, at first it was mostly the depression and the radiation poisoning. But after that: this strange little family she’s created for herself, that she trusts implicitly to have her back when she’s not at her best, that she has sworn a thousand times over to protect in return.

Maybe Peter Nureyev is just now realizing that, for what might be the first time in his life, that’s something he’s a part of as well. 

She looks at him now, and is surprised to realize that she’s made a decision. Is it a smart decision? Lord only knows, at this point. But something deep in her gut is telling her it’s the right thing to do, and Buddy’s intuition is very rarely wrong. Still, there’s one more thing she has to know before she acts on it. 

Buddy sets the tablet down next to her and rises from her cross-legged position on the bed, wincing at the audible pop of her joints. Closes the distance between herself and Nureyev, shoves the papers and half-empty mug on Vespa’s desk to one side before perching on top of it. Nureyev swivels around in his chair to face her. Their knees are almost touching. 

“I’m curious, Pete,” Buddy says. The name sits strangely in her mouth, now that she knows it’s been the man’s real name all along. “What made you decide to come tell me the truth about all of this? I’m sure it would’ve been easier for you to go through with your original plan.” She’s fairly certain she knows the answer, but she wants to hear him say it.

“Whenever possible, I try to steal only from people who deserve it. Even if they’ve done nothing to directly warrant my taking advantage of them, I’m usually able to find some roundabout way to justify it to myself. To explain how the galaxy’s somehow better off now that my mark has been separated from their valuables.”

Nureyev takes off his glasses, sets them on the desk beside him, then buries his face in his hands. “But I have had a lot of time to think these past few days, and I cannot justify what I was about to do to this family. You all have given me a great deal of kindness — even Vespa, who apparently trusts me now, at least in some respect? And more than that, you would use the items I was planning to steal to save billions of people, while I would use them only to save my own skin, then continue making others’ lives worse. The Map, Key, Blade, and Book are better off in your hands than mine.”

That settles it, for Buddy.

“That’s funny,” Buddy says. “Because I was just about to ask if you wanted me to give them to you.”

He blinks at her from behind his fingers. “What?”

“I read the dossier. Your creditors aren’t expecting you to deliver them until the end of the year, correct?”

“...That is true, yes.”

“I can’t make you any promises if our heist doesn’t go as planned, but if all goes well, we should have the Curemother Prime by the end of next month. Once it’s in our possession, we have no more use for the Map, Key, Blade, and Book. After that, if this is a matter of life and death — which I’m under the impression it is — I see no harm in letting you have them.”

Nureyev puts his hands down slowly, stares at her like she’s speaking a language he doesn’t understand. He opens and shuts his mouth several times, stutters out a series of half-formed sentences that trail off into nothing.

Finally, he settles on, “With all due respect, Captain… why would you do that?”

Buddy smiles. “Because when I first accepted you onto this crew, I did so knowing two things. One, that you were in a difficult situation and there was a decent chance you’d end up betraying us. Two, that you’re a man of strong morals. I took a gamble, and hoped those morals would lead you to make the right choice, in the end,” she says. “And based on everything you’ve told me tonight, I’m confident my faith in you wasn’t misplaced.”

Nureyev gapes at her. “But… I was going to sell you out. You just read a thirty-page dossier on how I was going to sell you out.”

“Yes, but there’s a difference between planning to do something and actually doing it, isn’t there? You made a choice thinking it was either that or death, and when you realized it was the wrong choice, you refused to follow through with it. You made amends for it before the choice you made could hurt anyone — even though that meant revealing a secret I’m sure you’d have rather kept hidden. That still leaves you a good man in my book.”

She puts a tentative hand on his shoulder. He stiffens, but doesn’t pull away, and so she leaves it there. “Besides, I’ve grown to quite like having you on my ship. You’re just as much a part of this family as anyone else. Making one mistake doesn’t change that.”

It’s quiet for a long moment as they just sit there, Nureyev trying to figure out what to say, Buddy giving him space to do so. Eventually, he relaxes into the hand on his shoulder, almost leans into it.

When Nureyev speaks again, his eyes are wet, shining against the fluorescent light of the spaceport outside. Buddy pretends not to notice. “Thank you,” is all he says, voice breaking. “ _Thank you._ ”

And maybe Buddy really is making a foolish choice, trusting him like this. Maybe her forgiveness is going to come back and bite her later.

But it’s like Nureyev said earlier: a foolish choice can also be the right choice to make. 

And looking at him now, all of his masks discarded, staring at Buddy like the realization that he has people who care about him has just upended his entire world? Buddy wants nothing more than to finish this heist with her entire family intact.

**Author's Note:**

> My first Penumbra fic, hopefully of many! Leave a kudos or comment if you liked - or come yell at me on Tumblr @brunchandtedium <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [space age crystals](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26244265) by [goinghost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goinghost/pseuds/goinghost)




End file.
